


left for dead (in my shallow grave)

by friedgalaxies



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Amnesia, Found Family, Gen, Light Angst, M/M, Murder Mystery, Resurrection, Temporary Amnesia, like the world’s worst coming of age novel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-15 04:01:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29553210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friedgalaxies/pseuds/friedgalaxies
Summary: There’s a boy in Maka’s bathroom.
Relationships: Black Star & Death the Kid, Maka Albarn & Black Star, Maka Albarn & Death the Kid, Spirit Albarn | Death Scythe/Franken Stein
Comments: 13
Kudos: 22





	left for dead (in my shallow grave)

There’s a boy in Maka’s bathroom.

This wouldn’t be so strange an occurrence, considering she lives with two men, her fathers, and her house sees frequent appearances from her pseudo-step-brother and best friend often, except the boy on the floor of her bathroom is none of them and it’s 3AM. Black Star has a horrible sense of timing, has shown up at the window of Maka’s room when the sun has yet to peek through her curtains and cast buttery slashes of yellow light across her sleeping face, but he’s never been this bad about it before.

Except the boy isn’t Black Star, and he’s sitting on the tiled floor of her bathroom holding a blood-soaked towel to what can only be a head injury, looking entirely too calm for the situation at hand.

“Hello.” the boy said.

“... Hi,” Maka hesitantly returned, holding onto the door frame for dear life. The boy blinked up at her, flashing brilliant amber, almost gold hued eyes beneath thick, dark lashes. He looked to be about her age, if a little younger, so something like a senior or junior in high school. His skin was pale, a shade off from being corpse-like, though that could’ve just been from the blood loss, or the contrasting inky darkness of his hair where it fell in a sharp V over his forehead. Three white streaks started at his left temple and travelled counterclockwise halfway around the back of his head. He was pretty, in a kind of otherworldly, uncanny valley Goth sort of way, with the snakebites and host of golden piercings in his ears.

Beyond that, he was utterly filthy.

His clothes might’ve been nice, once, some kind of sharp suit with a billowing cravat, but now it was covered in dirt and mud and bits of dead leaves, and what was probably his own blood at the collar, a dark, wet patch from shoulder to cuff. He was missing his shoes, though he wore socks, black and gray argyle.

“Um,” Maka started. He blinked at her again.

“Maka! Good, you’re awake. Thought I was gonna have to charge in there with a Super Soaker and drench you to consciousness!” Black Star boomed over her shoulder, appearing with an armful of clean towels and a pair of— were those her papa’s sweats? Black Star bustled around her with a grin, helping the alien boy up from the floor of her bathroom. “How’s that for a good morning, huh?”

“Black Star,” Maka groaned, burying her face in her hands. “What the hell are you doing with a boy I’ve never seen before in my bathroom at 3AM? Please tell me this isn’t another of your stupid ARG prank things.”

“Nah, nah, I promise it isn’t! Maka, meet, uh…” he trailed off, mid-gesture. “Hey, what’s your name?”

The boy shrugged, shoulders lifting in the barest display of acknowledgement. His finely tailored suit jacket wrinkled along the line of his fine, slim shoulders with the movement. “I have no idea. If I remembered, I would’ve told you by now.”

“You don’t remember your own name?” Maka asked, starting to feel a little bit like she was still asleep and this was some sort of ridiculous fever dream. She pinched her own arm for good measure.

“Yeah, I found him in the woods when Soul and I were setting up for that bonfire— Tsu’ said she can make it, by the way. He doesn’t remember anything, apparently.” Black Star set out the clothes he’d pilfered from somewhere in Maka’s house on the bathroom counter, peeling away the towel the boy was holding to his head with deliberate movements. They winced in unison as the blood-soaked fabric peeled away from his skin with the sticky crack of partially dried blood. A gash ran along his face from where his left ear met his cheek, across his forehead to meet his hairline beneath rumpled bangs. It was already beginning to scab over, so it couldn’t have been that deep despite the length and the amount of blood that would surely never wash out of one of Maka’s hand towels. Despite it, though, the boy’s placid expression didn’t change, simply looking at the drying blood on his fingers with a quiet disdain.

“Alright, you get cleaned up in the shower and come meet us in the kitchen when you’re done, yeah? It’s just down the hall— and be quiet, Maka’s ‘rents are still asleep,” Black Star clapped the boy amicably on the shoulder, grinning broadly. Maka opened her mouth to object, because this was her house, even if it was currently being turned into a two-man circus a-la ringleader Black Star, but her weird, obnoxious kind-of-foster-brother was steering her out of the bathroom before she could get out anything more than an indignant squawk.

“C’mon Maks, let's give the man some privacy!” he flashed another beaming grin over his shoulder, pulling the bathroom door shut behind him with a soft click. Maka resisted the urge to groan, instead opting to pad as quietly as she could into the kitchen and begin the most silent making of a grilled cheese sandwich anyone had ever witnessed in history.

“‘Star, you couldn’t at least do this shit in your own house?” she asked, spreading butter over both sides of a piece of white bread in generous layers. Black Star shrugged, hopping up to sit on the kitchen counter.

“Sid would kill me if I brought a boy home in the middle of the night, even if he was bleeding out from having just crawled out of a shallow grave. ‘Sides, I knew you’d help.”

“That doesn’t mean you can just— wait, _what?_ ” she squeaked in alarm, tamping her voice down to a quiet hiss with a wince. “You mean to tell me the kid in my bathroom is a fucking _amnesiac zombie?_ ”

Black Star’s mouth quirked downwards into a considering frown, “I mean, he is pretty pale but I’unno about the zombie part—”

“Black Star, you just told me that this kid—” she made a frenetic stabbing motion towards the bathroom with her butter knife— “just crawled out of a grave! How the fuck does that not make him a zombie? Traditionally, people are dead when you put them in graves!”

She waved her butter-coated knife around as she spoke, like she was preparing to shiv Black Star with it should he continue to tell her any nonsense even more ridiculous than that of which she was currently turning over in her head like some kind of shitty, overly complex B-rated horror movie plot; and considering how this conversation was going, she just might, sibling complex or not.

Black Star leaned back against the cabinets, crossing his unfairly buff arms over his chest with another shrug. “I mean, I really dunno what to tell you, Maks. Soul and I were settin’ up for the bonfire tonight and all of a sudden, there’s an arm stickin’ out from beneath the tinder pile! Soul ‘bout pisses his pants, so we stand there like a couple’a idiots while this kid digs himself out of his own grave, gaspin’ for air!”

“And where is Soul right now?” Maka hissed, timbre matching that of the grilled cheese as butter popped and sizzled in the pan.

“At home. Told you, ‘bout pissed his pants-- you should’ve seen the expression on his face, Maks-- so I told him I’d take care of it and he went on home.”

Maka glared into the pan, turning the grilled cheese over onto its uncooked side with an expert flip of her spatula. “So you thought the best course of action would be to bring him here.”

“In my defense, Stein is a doctor—”

“Yeah, and Nygus is a nurse—”

“ _And_ neither of your folks are gonna skin me alive for bein’ out so late!”

“You’re right,” she grumbled, “Stein’ll probably dissect you instead.”

“Hey, don’t even joke about that, man.”

“Joke about what?”

They both jumped, turning to face the doorway while Maka wielded her spatula like an impromptu weapon. The kid stood in the kitchen doorway, carefully combing his hair down into place with thin, spindly fingers. His gaze was even more unnerving in the dim light of the kitchen than it had been in the well-lit bathroom, gold irises almost seeming to take on the barest hint of a glow. Maka shivered.

“Nothing. Here, I made you something to eat while we look at that head wound of yours.” Maka transferred the grilled cheese to a plate, offering it in his direction. He stared at it as if she were offering him alien larvae and blinked with a slight shake of his head.

“I prefer my sandwiches cut into halves. Triangles, not squares.”

“How d’you know that? I thought you said you couldn’t remember nothin’,” Black Star piped up from his position as a counter gargoyle, scowling. The kid shrugged, settling into a seat at the kitchen table, hands folded primly before him.

“Can’t remember _anything_. Couldn’t remember nothing is a double negative. And I can’t, I just… know it.” He accepted the now sliced grilled cheese with a quiet thanks, holding one half in both hands, pinkies stuck out ever so slightly. Maka shook her head, running soapy water over the pan she’d cooked the grilled cheese with in the sink.

“You’re tellin’ me you can’t remember your name, but you can remember you like your sandwiches cut into triangles?” Black Star hopped off the counter, retrieving the first aid kit from where Maka’s parents kept it beneath the sink and moving to inspect their new houseguest’s head wound. The kid winced at the brush of Black Star’s fingers through his inky bangs but continued to eat, methodically biting at either end of the sandwich so it remained symmetrical. Black Star frowned. “Hey, that’s weird.”

“What is? The fact that you’re looking at a zombie’s bleeding forehead in the middle of my kitchen at 3AM while he eats a grilled cheese?” Maka shot back, sarcasm thick in her words. Black Star waved her off, stepping back out of the kid’s space and returning the first aid kit to where it belonged.

“Nah, just that his wound went n’ closed up already.” Maka blinked, careful not to let the wet pan drip over the tile floor as she padded over to check for herself, drying with her free hand in slow, continuous circles. The wound that had been slowly oozing dark blood over the mystery kid’s temple had closed over already, just as Black Star had said, a bright red scab formed over the wound, pink and shiny where the scab met undamaged skin. Maka blinked, frowning, but went to put her pan away and sit down at the table across from the kid.

By now, he had finished the first half of his grilled cheese and was moving on to the other, looking up at the two of them with a placid expression and greasy crumbs stuck to one corner of his mouth. Maka rubbed at her face yet again, determined to believe this was just all some kind of demented fever dream and she was going to wake up and realize it was just an ordinary day of summer break before her senior year, even going so far as to pinch her own cheek. But despite her best efforts, the two spectres in her kitchen stayed, Black Star already puttering about with the coffee machine like it was his own house.

“Coffee, Maks?” he asked, scooping a gratuitous amount of grounds into the filter and setting the machine to drip. Maka nodded, cheeks squishing up in what was undoubtedly a very unbecoming display where she rested them on her fists, bony elbows braced against the table.

“Your name is… Max?” the kid asked, politely pushing his clean plate away and fixing that borderline unnerving stare on her yet again. Maka felt like she was being held under a microscope, resisting the urge to squirm away from under it. The guy looked borderline malnourished, though he hadn’t consumed the sandwich with so much as anything but perfect table manners.

She failed, instead opting to trade his empty plate for a cloth napkin and going through the same wash-dry-put-away process with the plate. “No, Black Star just calls me Maks because he knows I hate it. I’m Maka Albarn. Since we’re making introductions I’d ask your name too, but…” she trailed off with a shrug.

“I understand. I apologize for putting you out, and for dirtying your towels.” He nodded to where the hand towel Black Star had used to mop up the blood from his wound sat on top of the washing machine, folding wooden doors at the back of the kitchen open to reveal the closet where the Albarn-Stein household washer and dryer was housed. Maka cringed.

“Don’t worry about it, dude. You’ve got some fuckin’ sick and twisted horror movie amnesia type stuff goin’ on, a little stained towel is like, little peas.” Black Star offered, already taking down three mugs from the cabinet.

“Small potatoes,” Maka corrected, scooping up the towel to dump it in the washer alongside the towels the boy had used for his shower from the bathroom floor.

“Whatever. Hey, kid, coffee?”

“Sure.” Black Star took down another mug from the cabinet. Maka wrinkled her nose, both in confusion and at the smell of bleach as she dumped a generous capful into the washer and set the machine running.

“Who’s the fourth mug for?”

“Stein, duh.”

“Shit,” Maka hissed, “it’s five already?”

“It is.” All three teenagers in the room jumped at the presence of a new voice, deep and unmistakably male, followed shortly by a looming silhouette in the kitchen doorway. The lights flicked on and Frank Stein, Maka’s step-father, was revealed, one hand on the light switch and rubbing at the silvery scar that spanned his face beneath coke bottle glasses with the other. “Good morning, children. Black Star, what are you and this boy doing in my house?”

Black Star grinned sheepishly, pouring a generous serving of coffee into the largest mug and offering it to Stein, “Uh, is teenage shenanigans an acceptable answer?”

Stein hummed. Wrapped a long-spindly hand around the offered mug and sipped deeply as the three teenagers watched on in tense silence. “Acceptable.”

Black Star heaved a visible sigh of relief and set about making coffee for the rest of them, Maka moving to take bowls and spoons from their respective cabinets and all the cereal boxes they had to offer from the top of the fridge, because they were awake and having breakfast now, apparently.

Maka settled with a bowl of fruit loops just as Black Star finished preparing coffees for the rest of them, Stein settling into his own seat with a bowl of raisin bran and a blueberry muffin. The kid watched on in silence, only offering a small thanks as Black Star passed his mug over, a small, pale pink thing Maka had gotten one year on her birthday as a miniature planter. The mint plant inside had died almost instantly, but the mug was too cute to part with.

“So,” Stein said, drawing the word out between bites of cereal. He pointed his spoon accusingly across the table, green-grey eyes narrowing in suspicion beneath his unruly flop of prematurely gray hair. “Who are you, exactly?”

The boy shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“And where did these insolent children find you?”

“Digging myself out of my own shallow grave in the woods, is what I hear. I don’t have much memory beyond struggling for air and breaking to the surface in a pile of tinder. Apparently I made some poor soul piss his pants, but after that my recollection is much clearer.”

The serious, deadpan tone he said it all with almost made Maka want to laugh, if it wasn’t such a sad situation.

“Right.” Stein adjusted his glasses, taking another long sip of coffee before continuing. “Well, as I’m sure you’ve heard, I’m a doctor, which is why I assume the problem child brought you to our humble home instead of anywhere else.”

“Hey-!” Black Star started, though he quickly quieted with a yelp as Maka kicked him underneath the table.

“If it’s alright with you, I’ll perform a perfunctory exam to make sure nothing is out of place. Check for a concussion, test your reflexes, nothing too invasive.”

“That’s fine. I don’t much enjoy being touched in the first place.” The boy blinked, looking down at his pale hands where they wrapped around the mug. “I don’t know how I knew that.”

“Hey, it's a good sign, right? Things are comin’ back!” Black Star piped up, mouth full of the unholy union between frosted flakes and fruity pebbles. Maka faked a wretch.

“At least finish your food before you talk, Star.”

“Hey, don’t tell me fuckin’ manners, Peanut.”

“You’re shorter than me-!”

“Children,” Stein interrupted, setting his mug down with an air of finality, even as the corner of his mouth twisted with the barest hint of mischief. The two bickering teens settled for making faces at each other. The boy seemed amused, if that was an expression that could even be registered on his placid face.

“As it stands, it seems like your memory is coming back, if only in bits and pieces. Until it returns enough so that you remember who you are, I suppose you can stay with us. This is likely the best place for you to be, after all.” Black Star cheered silently at Stein’s admission, waving his spoon in triumph. “I’ll try and get in touch with some social working friends of mine and see where that takes us.”

The kid dipped his head in acknowledgement. “Thank you for your generosity. I haven’t the slightest idea where I might be had Black Star not found me.”

“In the woods still, probably.”

“I don’t think he meant it that literally, ‘Star.” Maka said, rolling her eyes.

“Whatever. Hey, what do we call you till your memory comes back? I can’t just keep callin’ you ‘The Kid’.” Black Star asked, leaning forward on his elbows. The kid shrugged.

“I suppose that fits as well as anything else.”

“Kid it is!”

Maka opened her mouth to argue that that seemed a little dehumanizing, but considering there weren’t really any other options, she settled for shoveling more cereal into it instead.

Stein finished his breakfast, washing and drying his own dishes in the sink before retrieving another small but notably more professional looking first aid kit from the bathroom closet, pulling out a chair to examine Kid from.

“Turn and face me, if you wouldn’t mind.” Kid turned his own chair, sitting with such a straight, borderline clinical posture Maka had to wonder what kind of discipline he’d been raised with to naturally revert to it even when disoriented and injured.

Stein, though his bedside manner wasn’t perfect and he was more of an operating surgeon than anything, specializing in experimental surgeries and high-risk transplants, explained each step of the examination process as he performed it. Shining a bright pen light in Kid’s eyes and remarking on the dilation of his pupils, carefully palpating the area around his injury to check for tender spots, testing his reflexes and listening to his lungs and heart.

“Deep breath in,” Stein said, stethoscope pressed to the thin span of Kid’s back. Kid inhaled deeply. “And a deep breath out.”

Kid exhaled, waifish shoulders rattling with the depth of it. Stein hummed to himself, sanitizing and setting about putting the equipment in his home-examination bag back in their proper places.

“Congrats, there doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with you. Pupils respond normally to light, your reflexes are perfect, lungs and heart sound healthy as anything. Are you feeling sore anywhere, or any ache? Anything feel out of place.”

Kid turned to face him, stare so intent it was almost unnerving behind his long, dark lashes. “I feel a touch lightheaded and a bit stiff all over, but I assume that’s quite ordinary for one who revives from the grave.”

“He’s taking this whole ‘died and came back’ thing really well.” Black Star muttered from where he sat next to Maka at the kitchen table. She pinched the back of his hand to shut him up. It quickly devolved into a slap fight, with Maka holding Black Star in a headlock and he with one of her pigtails in an iron grip.

Stein glanced over at the two of them as he stood to put the kit away, the low kitchen light glinting off the round lenses of his glasses. “Like wild animals, you two are.”

Maka pinked but refused to let go of Black Star, unless he released her hair first. Black Star, of course, held no such shame. In fact, Maka wasn’t sure he was physically or biologically capable of feeling shame. Like some kind of scientifically engineered lab experiment.

Kid looked in the direction of the kitchen-based circus act they were conducting as well, the barest hint of a grin playing on his lips, the most emotion anyone had seen on him since entering the house. “It’s alright, I think it’s amusing. Siblings are always like that, after all.”

As the words left his mouth Kid began to frown, an earnest wrinkle between his dark brows. “I-....”

Maka softened, finally releasing Black Star who immediately began rubbing at the crick in his neck with the hand that had previously been occupied with strangling Maka’s pigtail. “Do you have siblings, Kid?”

“I’m… not sure.” he admitted. “I think… that I have a family waiting for me. After all, I’m not sure who would have buried me otherwise. People don’t tend to make graves for strangers.”

“Even shallow ones in the woods?” Black Star asked. The concern smoothed out the slightest bit from Kid’s face, replaced by a soft smile.

“Even shallow ones in the woods, yes.”

“Even shallow what in the woods?” came another voice from the kitchen doorway as Maka’s papa, Spirit, walked in yawning and scratching his stomach under his sleep shirt. Maka cringed. Black Star grinned. Stein was nowhere to be found.

“Uh, good morning, Papa. Let me introduce you to someone.”

It was several hours later, with Kid finally asleep on the couch and Black Star gone back to his own house to catch a few hours of sleep for himself and get ready for the bonfire their little group of friends was going to hold later that evening. Both Stein and Spirit had left for their respective jobs already, but Spirit was at least going to use the spare time he had at work to do a little research on Kid, and Stein had made it clear he was going to ask some of his coworkers in the neurological department if they knew anything about Kid’s particular case of amnesia.

This left Maka at home, alone, with the strange boy that had dug himself out of a shallow grave in the woods not but a handful of hours earlier that day. Not weird or creepy or unsettling at all.

At least Maka wasn’t afraid of ghosts.

She stood in the kitchen with the suit Kid had been buried in draped over the edge of the sink. She’d checked on Kid just a few minutes ago when she went to gather it up from the bathroom floor, of whom slept eerily like the dead. On his back, hands folded over his chest and barely breathing, not even shifting or mumbling in his sleep. She would’ve thought him dead for real if not for the soft puffs of air that heated up her palm when she held it a few centimeters from his nose.

The cravat, of course, all white silk and frilly edges, was completely unsalvageable. The suit jacket wasn’t much better, but at least there she might have been able to find some clues as to where Kid came from, what family he belonged to.

She wasn’t any kind of fashion aficionado, but it didn’t look like anything from any local places. Far too fancy and definitely custom tailored, with a unique shape to the waist and shoulders. It was hard to tell Kid’s exact shape through the oversized sleep shirt Black Star had forcibly borrowed for him, but his wrists were bird-bone thin and his face was much the same, almost hauntingly gaunt, like he hadn’t been fed in years. If she’d seen him in public she would’ve thought him deathly ill, or perhaps wearing some incredibly impressive costume makeup.

Speaking of, the suit itself was a style she’d never seen before, but it definitely looked old, like it hadn’t been in date for centuries at the very least. Sure, some people were into vintage fashion— Tsubaki had a unique love for vintage kimonos and traditional wear— but it was just plain… weird. It looked almost Victorian, maybe Edwardian, but Maka wasn’t exactly the foremost expert in vintage fashion styles.

Besides, the more interesting aspects weren’t as much the style of the suit but the damage to the suit itself. It was muddy, covered in bits of leaf detritus and dried bloodstains, one of the shoulders almost completely torn to where the sleeve itself was barely hanging on. A big tear sliced through the center of the suit between the middle most buttons. When she folded the lapels together, the split lined up perfectly though both sides of the suit jacket, edges clean.

Cleaner than a tear, actually, nothing like the unintentional tears and rips she’d been stitching together in her own clothes since she was a little girl.

Cleaner than a tear. Almost like….

A stab.

But no, that was ridiculous. Even if Kid had been buried in the woods, his body was dressed cleanly, aside from the blood that must’ve dripped down his body from the slash on his forehead from the sharp edge of some hidden rock as he clawed his way out, and the obvious mud.

But it was the same on the button down shirt underneath, a silky, lacy white thing not unlike the cravat. And when she held it up, the bloodstain was so much clearer on the light fabric, a rusty brown mark she’d mistaken for dirt at first. Maka’s hands trembled ever so slightly as she held the shirt up to her own front, trying to recall the almost concerningly detailed anatomy course she’d gotten from Stein in junior year.

The bloodstain was right where the liver would be. And another tear, too clean to be organic, on the left side of the chest. She counted the ribs on her own torso, starting at the bottom till her fingers hit the second, smaller, cut.

Between ribs four and five. Right in the heart.

Kid hadn’t just died. Someone had killed him, and he’d come back to life.

This was _so_ much bigger than anything Maka wanted to deal with the summer before her senior year.

**Author's Note:**

> so this may or may not have been inspired by an ncis episode of the same name (w/o the parentheses) uhhh i’m honestly not sure if i’m going to continue this but i really want to! though it mostly depends on what feedback i get haha. i’ve been writing intermittently on this for a while and decided to post it just to get it out of my drafts. as always, comments, concrit, and questions welcomed! <3


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